Last month, more than 1,200 New York Times contributors and 34,000 readers and media professionals signed a open letter to the newspaper expressing concern over its coverage of trans, non-binary, and gender-nonconforming people.
Predictably, The Times denied all claims of bias, saying its coverage “strives to explore, interrogate and reflect societal experiences, ideas and debates”. But those who think the Times’ coverage of trans lives is not only biased, but also downright dangerous, point to legal petitions in several US states for anti-trans legislation that cite reports from the newspaper and articles on its opinion and editorial pages.
The dangers posed by The Times’ coverage are both gruesome and horribly predictable. They are the inescapable result of enshrining “objectivity” as a guiding principle in American media, creating an environment where telling “every side” of the story can harm precisely the people whose stories we seek to tell.
To understand how we got here, it helps to go back in time to discover the origins of the idea that still guides not only American media, but American culture as a whole. Before the 19th century, objectivity was defined by its root, “object”. If it was in the outside world, something that could be touched, smelled, or seen by more than one person, it was automatically considered objective, something as real as it was tangible.
The scientific revolution and the invention of machines like the camera, x-rays and voice recorder in the 19th century added another layer to this notion. In their wake, objectivity had more to do with our ability to set aside personal feelings, attitudes, and biases in the perception of things, including people, facts, and ideas.
But the original meaning of the concept has persisted in this new iteration, as the machines – the objects – have achieved detachment better than humans ever could. The camera, for example, and its light-capturing and converging processes were hailed for eliminating errors and biases that plagued human renderings of any scene. The same was believed for the voice recorder, X-rays, and many later inventions until today, when algorithms are considered both more accurate and neutral than humans.
Then and now, we value objectivity primarily as a way to overcome our emotions, our flaws – our humanity. From this fundamental fear of ourselves and our fallibility grew the idea of journalistic objectivity, which encourages a semblance of “machine” accuracy and detachment in journalists. In practice, this often takes the form of impartiality, “telling all sides” of a story, and avoiding too close relationships with sources.
At first glance, these principles seem logical, allowing readers to make their own judgment after digesting all relevant facts. Yet these “objective” principles often mask deeply subjective trade-offs.
In a world of limited resources and attention spans, editors and journalists still have to make choices about what they cover, who they interview, what questions they ask, how they frame the events they report on, which information and characters are amplified and which are downplayed. And in the United States, where newsrooms continue to be predominantly whitestories considered “objective” are often those that appeal to white sensibilities.
This is why, in general, minorities – whether defined by race, sexual orientation or gender identity – are rarely treated with the same depth, nuance or attention as the majority. Instead, in our quest for objectivity, the media too often falls back on the tropes that white, cisgender, and heterosexual audiences expect: poor brown people, angry black people, sexually confused teenagers, aboriginal people living in harmony with nature, etc. More than we like to admit, objectivity translates into laziness – both by the media and its audience.
The many failures of objectivity begin to seem inevitable as one unravels the history of the concept. The story I told earlier of its evolution linked to the invention of certain machines is only half of its real story, which is also linked to prejudice and fear – of ourselves and others.
The German philosopher Immanuel Kant, for example, who first formulated objectivity and subjectivity in opposition to each other, also used these ideas to argue for a racial hierarchy that placed “the negro… lazy, meek and insignificant” below.
In recent years, the camera, hailed for its ability to perfectly reproduce reality, has proven to be as subjective as the mind that powers it.
“A photograph need not be a lie,” wrote critic John Berger, “but neither is it the truth. Rather, it is a fleeting and subjective impression. This impression depends on the relationship of the subject to the photographer and at this precise moment. It depends on the light, the editing and the composition. It depends on what is included and what remains out of the frame, never to be seen.
Consider, for example, the National Geographic photographs. In 2018, the magazine asked researcher John Edwin Mason to delve into its 130 years of coverage and investigate its history of racial representation. Mason find that “the magazine’s photography, like the articles, did not simply emphasize difference, but … prioritized difference” with Westerners and whites in the lead.
This type of calculation is as rare as it is needed in our media institutions, especially those in the United States. media studies found that across Europe, the Middle East, East Africa and South Asia, “objectivity” is not a major feature media institutions, which means that America’s obsession with it is as culturally specific as the Super Bowl or the Fourth of July celebrations. It also means that if objectivity has lost its usefulness – or if its dangers outweigh its usefulness – we can and should look elsewhere for alternatives to replace it.
Today, most media in Europe and the Global South have adopted a ‘contextual’, ‘analytical’ or ‘interpretive’ style of journalism, which asks journalists to contribute their professionally grounded but nuanced opinions on what is exactly true and why.
American journalist Wesley Lowery’s idea of ”moral clarityis also promising, requiring that sources offering misinformation or biased opinions be clearly labeled as such, and that media executives think deeply about who is offered the platform of an opinion piece or report. editorial, which does not have the bodyguard of a journalist. questions.
Moral clarity also means that media institutions hire and empower reporters from the communities they seek to cover instead of simply believing that an “objective” reporter can tell the story of any community.
Moral clarity, in other words, holds that truth is not the same as objectivity, which can skate by being ahistorical, apolitical, and independent of context. Compared to the truth, objectivity is the easy way out, the trap into which whiteness and fear have made us fall. It’s the present stripped of the past, a nation asleep in its own history – and a newspaper that believes its cover can “explore, interrogate and reflect” without shaping the very reality it covers.
The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial position of Al Jazeera.
